CHAPTER LI.
NOT IN A HURRY
We were all pretty sure that this discovery of Tony’s concerned us deeply, and might lead to something, if followed up at once with luck and skill. But we thought it more important that he should go first to Woking Road, and inquire further into the story of Joe Clipson’s cab, which he was sure to do much better than myself; for he could make himself look like a brother cabman, without any trouble.
He had little more to tell us about the Coke Yard yet, for he had to feel his way very tenderly there, and must wait for opportunities. And Bulwrag (who was never very sweet of temper, though, unlike his mother, he could curb himself) had been more like a bear than a cultivated Christian, since he got that cut across his knuckles. As our sympathies were not with the sufferer, Tony made us laugh by his description of the want of resignation in a case so trifling.
“Here it is,” cried Bulwrag, after hopping round the room, as soon as his poultice began to draw; “look at this scurvy Saint! He is made of copper. Why the devil couldn’t he have a Saint made of gold?”
Tonks replied that perhaps the individual with the hat could not afford a golden Saint to sit upon the brim; and the copper perhaps had done him a much better turn than gold, both in saving his head from the crushing blow, and avenging it on the smiter. For the wound looked very angry, and it might be even dangerous. But what made him wear such a Saint at all?
“How the deuce can I tell why they wear such rubbish?” Bulwrag had answered crustily. “Those foreign sailors are such fools. You know more about him than I do.”
This was by no means true as yet, though Tonks hoped to make it so, if allowed his own time about it. And he told us quite earnestly, and as I believe sincerely, that he never had felt, not his mind alone, but his heart, more deeply engaged in solving the merits of the darkest horse in the leariest stable, than they both were now in getting to the very bottom of this affair about my Kitty. And though I did not altogether like his way of putting it, when the meaning is good we must not quarrel with the manner in which other people look at things.
So we treated him well and put him up for the night; and the following morning I drove him by way of Weybridge to Woking Road Station, or as near thereto as we could get without any one observing us. Then I went back to Weybridge, so as to meet him at that station, and hear all he had to say, before he took another train for London.
Nothing could have been better managed. I borrowed a badge from Sims the flyman, and a spotted yellow neckerchief, and a broken whip, and Tony lounged into the inn-yard, as if he had left his cab down at the blacksmith’s by the bridge. As I saw him in the distance I said to myself that nature must have meant him for the driver of a cab, for he put his knee out and turned his heels in, and carried his elbows, as if he had been born so. Any brotherhood of good will and lofty feeling, such as that of cabmen essentially is, must welcome him at once, and make him free of any knowledge it possessed that would bring in nothing.
And so it proved, when he rejoined me by the two o’clock train at Weybridge. “What have you ordered?” he asked; and I replied, —
“Chump chops, new potatoes, and pickled onions.”
“Couldn’t be better,” he was good enough to say; “but have in the pewter first. Blest if I believe there’s anything to parch the throat like a jolly good lie, and if I’ve told one, I’ve told fifty. Dinner first, business afterwards.”
That I should consent to this will show how thoroughly I had been drilled by long endurance and fretful discipline. Perpetual disappointment too, and the habit which hope had now acquired of falling without a blow – just like an over-matched prize-fighter – as well as a sense of evil fortune, drove me sometimes almost into the apathy of a fatalist. And so I let Tony Tonks munch on, and even joined him in that process.
“I wish I had got that to do again,” he said, as at last he laid down knife and fork; “I don’t often do so well as that. The air of these commons is uncommon sharp, sharper even than the Heath is. But you have been very patient, and I won’t keep you any longer. I found out all they knew back there, and it only cost a shilling. I don’t know that it is worth much more; for it carries us very little further. But so far as it goes, it is plain enough. I had it from Joe Clipson, the man who drove them; and no secret was made of the affair to him.”
Now the story, as he had it, comes to this. Some one got out at Woking Road Station, on the afternoon of May 15th, it might have been an up or it might have been a down train, Clipson could not say, for two trains came in together, and the man had no luggage of any sort. The date could be fixed by several things, and there could not be any doubt about it. And the time when two trains meet there in the afternoon is 4.15; which comes pretty close to our figures.
This man carried nothing but a little bag, a little black leather bag, such as nine people out of ten have. There were three cabs, or flies as they called them there, waiting in the station yard; for it is their busiest time of the day, and he chose Clipson’s, because the horse looked freshest, and told him to drive to Shepperton, without saying a word about the fare.
Clipson had not been in that part long, and he had scarcely heard of Shepperton, which is severed from all those Surrey places by the unbridged river. But it seemed to him a pleasant thing to start without any fettering as to money, and the man who engaged him seemed very free of that, in a style that said – “Never stand out for a shilling.” And he seems to have acted up to this; although it is scarcely ever done, except with a true friend’s money. But Clipson did not care whose it was, if he might be allowed to go home with it.
The day was very bright and pleasant – exactly as I remembered it – with plenty of light in the air, but no heat, and no flies to make horses grieve that they cannot swear. Clipson remembered how cold it grew, even before the sun went down, and he tucked a sack under his calves as he came home, because he had promised Mrs. Clipson so, and his word was more tender in absence.
He said that his fare seemed to know a good bit about the principles of the road – that was the word he used for it – as if he had learned it from a map, or description which somebody had rubbed into him. But he was not in any way up to the corners, which show – as Joe said, and with some reason too – whether a man understands what he is at properly. But he knew where he was at Chertsey Bridge, and he waved his hand at the first turn to the right.
Being a Surrey man, from some outlandish part in that straggling country, Clipson was not at all comfortable upon our side of the river. To a certain extent, and with much better reason, I feel the same thing as regards them; though I admit (without thinking twice about it) that there are plenty of good people there, and especially my Aunt Parslow. But Clipson, although he depended for his livelihood upon a railway station, did not like going into unknown places, especially with a horse who might come down and stop there; for there was only one sound knee out of sixteen that were washed in the yard every Saturday; but that one belonged to Clipson.
His horse was a clipper, by his own account; and nobody could tell how good he was, because he never had been called upon to do his best. Still it was a toughish journey for him; and Mr. Clipson could not see, taking the state of the roads into account, and the distance, and the waiting, how he could charge less than five and twenty shillings; and if asked to go again he would not do it for the money. For he waited four hours, as he vowed, and I daresay it may have been three, at the public-house, which is a sharp pull from the house of Phil Moggs at the waterside.
For these details I did not care so much (although they were full of interest) as I cared to know who the man was that employed him, and how he behaved, and whether he looked good, and above all how my darling Kitty seemed to take things, and what she said, and whether she was weeping all the way about myself. The cabman had paid no attention at all to this part of the question, and could give no more account of Kitty, than if she had been a portmanteau, or inside one. Tony Tonks had never asked (as a man of kind nature would have done) whether my dear had a handkerchief in her hand, or whether she seemed to gulp down a sob, or how she looked up at the evening-star, or even what the condition of her eyes was! For him it was quite enough to learn, that the “young ’ooman looked down in the mouth like.” Well, that is the way the world goes on.
About that I cared to make no fuss; for it even seemed a pleasure to me that none but myself should know these things; remembering as I did, that no one ever could cry as my Kitty could. For I never could understand how it was, that having so very little practice as she had (in spite of many opportunities), she could yet make anybody feel as if all the world was woe, the moment there appeared a gleam of trouble in her soft eyes. I am tolerably hard, and Uncle Corny harder still – from having lived so much longer – but either of us would rather have had a 64lb. box of strawberries drop from the tail of the van upon the tender places of both feet, than let a single word fall from us, even in the hottest moment, to bring a cloud into those tender eyes. However, all people are not like us; and perhaps she never let that cabman see what was the matter with her; for she was proud, as well as gentle.
Moreover the man was hungry, and that makes a world of difference. The kindest man that was ever born cannot be expected fairly to feel for his fellow-creatures, when he is yearning after animals. The heart being full of beef and mutton, because there are none in the stomach, how can any room be left for creatures of less relish? This explanation may be unsound; but at any rate the cabman did not melt at Kitty’s weeping.
And now two questions of prime importance rose in following out this tale. It was evident from two accounts, both that of Moggs the boatman and of Clipson the cab-driver, that no kind of compulsion had been used to make Kitty go with them. It was plain that she went of her own accord, deeply grieved – as the boatman’s story showed – but resigned and patient. In the first place, then, who was the man that had done all this to fetch her? And again, when they got to Woking Station, whither did they journey thence?
As to the first point Tony Tonks had found out little more than I did. The cabman said that he believed he would know the gent again if he saw him, but there was nothing very particular about him to notice. He seemed to be elderly, and rather short, but very sharp and active. His clothes were dark, and he wore a short cloak, not much longer than a policeman’s cape. He did not sit at the young lady’s side, but on the front seat opposite to her, and he did not seem to be talking to her much. It was quite dark when they left Shepperton, and it must have been ten o’clock when they arrived, or later; for the horse was a little lame from standing still so long. They did not seem to be in any hurry, and as they had no luggage, except a couple of light bags, he did not follow them on to the platform, and could not pretend to say which way they went, for there were three more down-trains after that, and four or it might be five to London.
As to that, Tonks had made vain inquiries of the station-porters, and booking clerks. It was so long ago by this time, that even those who might have noticed them had forgotten. They had passed into the station, that was very well established; but after that nothing at all could be discovered, and there the clue broke hopelessly.
After hearing all these things, I became sadly downcast. They reminded me of that dreadful night when the snowdrifts overwhelmed me. I seemed to be walking in the same sort of maze, continually struggling to get forward, and perpetually driven back, seeming to walk with all my might, yet by a stronger power to stand still. And losing all confidence in myself, I asked Tony Tonks what he thought of it, just as if he had been the great oracle that smelled the turtle soup of Crœsus, without even longing for a taste of it.
“It all turns out just according to my views,” replied Tonks, as if he saw his views running like the gravy, which he had been saving up to drink out of the spoon; “the same as I have expressed all along, and find them confirmed more by all I discover. Any one who puts two and two together could swear that Downy Bulwrag is at the bottom of the mischief, though he has taken uncommonly good care not to show his nose in it. I am rather inclined to think that the lady is on the Continent. They are more likely to have gone down the line than up. If they had meant to go to town, what should have taken them to Woking? Supposing they were shy of the Windsor line, Surbiton would have been their place, or Weybridge. Though of course they might have thought Woking road safer, so that we must not reason too much by that. By the way, can the lady speak French at all? That might make a difference to her.”
“I am not at all sure,” I replied after thinking; “for we never happened to talk of that. She was at a good school for a little time; and then that hateful woman, her stepmother, took her away when she was doing well, and sent her to a wretched place at £20 a year. She can read French, I know, because I asked her something; but I doubt whether she can speak it.”
“Then that’s where she is. I begin to smell a rat. He took her from Southampton, depend upon it. And now I twig some bit of meaning in that copper saint. The south of France – that’s where she is.”
“But why in the south of France, more than any other part?” I thought that he was jumping rather fast to his conclusions.
“Well, it might be Italy, or Spain,” he answered, with a fine generosity; “I can’t say very much about it. But a brother of mine was at sea, till he was drowned, and he traded a good deal from the south of France; and he had one of those things in his hat, because of being struck by lightning. They get it very bad in those waters, he declared; but I can’t call to mind the name of the saint that stops it. Of course I have no faith in such stuff, though there might be nothing to laugh at, after all I have seen about horses. But there it is. They stick those things up, as an officer’s coachman mounts a cockade; and bad luck it was for Master Downy’s knuckles. His hand was like a pease-pudding yesterday. His flesh is always of a yellow nature, like a Cochin China’s. Shouldn’t wonder a bit, if he got lockjaw.”
“Not till I have settled with him.” It made me forget the Rev. Peter, and all his style of regarding things, when people spoke as if right and wrong had an equal claim upon the Lord in heaven.
CHAPTER LII.
A WANDERING GLEAM
My uncle, however, was not like that. He had suffered too largely from rogues himself, in the neighbourhood of Covent Garden, to have any calm way of considering them.
“Either a man is honest through and through, or else he is a thief all over. It is humbug to talk as if a fellow didn’t know when he is stealing, or when he is not. He knows it pretty sharp when it is done to him; and he puts it short, as he has a right to do. And then he turns the corner, and he wipes his mouth, and serves others with the dose that made him sputter. To cheat the man that cheated you, is Christian enough; but not to pass it on to other people. Ask Mr. Golightly what he thinks about it.”
That pious clergyman would scarcely have been satisfied even with my uncle’s view of Christian conduct, although he was moderate in his expectations of us, after all his experience of our doings. This made it very pleasant to be with him frequently; and for my part I am certain that I never could have lasted through all this gloom, and suspense, and indignation, without his example and quiet comfort. All that we had found out, at Shepperton and at Woking, I owed to him, or at any rate to my acquaintance with him; and although it might not seem as yet to carry me much further, still I found some happiness in knowing that little, and hope of learning more from it. And now I went to him about another question, which I could not settle for myself.
It may be remembered that Tabby Tapscott, who came to attend to my uncle’s house, had more than once given me good advice; and some may have set me down as ungrateful for keeping her out of sight since my great disaster, as if she were of no importance. But the real truth is, that I had sought her counsel almost every time I saw her, and had found much comfort from it, because she was so scornful. For the little woman tossed her head, and shot forth her under-lip, as if she could not trust herself to speak, so thoroughly was her mind made up. She looked upon all that had happened as the fruits of a foul conspiracy on the part of man against woman, and she scarcely held me guiltless. And she had no patience with me, because I would not do the proper thing, to find out all about it. Until I did that, she would say no more, but leave me to listen to a set of zanies. Why on earth I refused was more than she could understand; and she went so far as to declare, once or twice, that I could not be in earnest about getting Kitty back, or I would have done it long ago. She herself had known a girl, of Westdown parish in the North of Devon, who found out all about her sweetheart’s murder, and got two men hanged for committing it.
The means were certainly simple enough, if anything would come of them. The bereaved one must let the full moon pass for as short a time as possible; and then, at twelve of the middle-day, go to the dress last worn by the lost one, and take something from the left side pocket, or failing that cut a piece out. Then he might carry on as he pleased, until it came to bed-time, and then do as follows. Under the pillow on his left-hand side, he must place whatever he had taken from the dress, and then instead of his common prayers, pray in the following manner —
“Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John,
Bring me back my love that’s gone.
Bring her white, or bring her red,
According as she is ’live or dead.”
Then he must throw the window up, or out, if it was a lattice, and look at the moon which would then be up (for he was supposed to keep good hours, as all gentle lovers should); and after that he must lie down, with his left ear on the pillow, and repeat the Doxology – which Tabby called the “Doxy” – until it made him go to sleep. Then, as sure as he was a living man – or in the other case a living woman – the lost one would appear at midnight, and tell him all about it. Only he, or she, must ask no questions, and above all offer no contradiction.
Now, I have never been superstitious; though some of the wisest men I have met with seem at times to be so; and I laughed at all this stuff of Tabby’s, although I had found her truthful. Then I asked her to go through it all for me; but she stared at my stupidity; “As if her would come nigh me!” she said. “It is the love as does it, and the angels to the back of it.”
But when she kept on so about it, and assured me that much wiser people than I, and a long sight better – as she was good enough to say – had tried this plan and been set up by it; I began to think that it could do no harm, and if it afforded her any pleasure – why, no one else need hear of it. Except that the sin of witchcraft is most strongly denounced in the Bible; and many might think that this proceeding savoured of that character. However, if the Church of England could be brought to sanction it, the Powers of the air might do their worst; for our church is built upon a rock.
The Rev. Peter Golightly said, when I opened out this case to him, that he was a little surprised to find me listening to such nonsense. I told him that it was very far from my desire to do so; but if it was likely to ease the minds of others, it might be my duty to go on with it. At this he laughed, and did not say, but seemed perhaps to mean it, that I was not bound to make a fool of myself, because my brother fools wished it. However, I was not going to be argued down about it; and I put the question point-blank to him, whether there was any sin in it. He could not say that there was any; but being more on his mettle now, declared that it was rank folly, and insisted very strongly on the superiority of prayer. There I had him on the nail; for what was this but a mode of prayer, invoking also those holy writers, who alone have taught us the use of prayer? He shook his head, as if unconvinced; but his daughter called him away just then, and I did not care to renew the subject, feeling that now I had his permission; which he might recall, if argued with.
The moon was full at six o’clock in the morning, as Uncle Corny said; and he always knew everything about her, except the weather she would bring. And at noon I went to my dear wife’s frock, the one she had worn on the very day before she disappeared from me. She had kept them on a row of hooks – for we were not rich in wardrobes – with a scarf of something drawn along to keep the dust from settling. It had been one of my sorest jobs to unhang them very reverently, remembering when she had worn them last, and how my arm had been round them. For she had a very pretty way of coming up in the morning (when her hair was done, and her collar on) for me to tell her how she looked, and to see that all her strings were right But now these empty dresses lay, all folded, and locked in the bottom drawer.
I may be soft beyond most people – although it is a fault more shared than shown – but when I had spread that simple frock upon the bed, which I never entered now, and passing both hands down the bosom, clumsily searched (as a man must do) for the mouth of the little pocket, and then could only get three fingers in – all the strength of my resolve to be quite firm and manly quivered on my lips, and melted in the haze that crept across my eyes. A tiny notebook, with a pencil, and a silver thimble, a little house-wife, and a button meant to be sewn on my coat, two or three jujubes (which she kept to pop into my mouth, because she fancied I was hoarse sometimes) nothing for herself, but all for me, or for my service; and then a little scrap of paper, my last scribble from the garden – “Darling, not till nine o’clock” – as I took them one by one, all seemed fragrant with her sweetness, and holy from her loving hand.
I could not bring myself to go through Tabby’s rigmarole that night; for my mind was full of larger thoughts, neither would I go upstairs into the lonely bedroom; but I gazed for some time at the moon, as people when in sorrow do, by some mysterious instinct. And then I placed a pillow, instead of the roll of mat beneath my head, and under it my dear wife’s house-wife, and her pretty thimble, not for that night only, but as my companions henceforth; and therewith I cast myself on the hard church-cushion, and thought of her. Before very long, I fell asleep, having done a good day’s garden-work at sundry jobs that were sadly in arrear.
But Tabby’s jingle was still in my head, moving without my will or wish, as a mouse comes in the wainscote; and with the moon shining into the room, one of my last reflections was that I had been very lucky in yielding to no witchcraft. Not that there could be anything to frighten me in my darling, “whether white, or whether red;” by which the old chant seemed to mean, whether she might be in the bloom of health, or the wan hue of the winding-sheet. In either case she would love me still; and that was the thing I cared most to know.
Suddenly, I sat up and looked. The old church clock was striking slowly, and the sleepy sound loitered on the drowsy air. The moon was gliding calmly on her southern road, and being in her humble summer state, she could scarcely top the big pear-tree which stood before my window. The room was full of light and shade, in bars, in patches, and in triangles, with no strong contrast in and out, but fused, like silver-wire netting, or water parted by the weir-posts, and rejoining under them. And there, in this faint flow of light and wavering ebb of shadow, I saw my Kitty, sitting calmly, and gazing at me steadfastly.
No surprise or fear whatever crossed my mind – which seems to show that I was not altogether wide awake; but I waited for her to say something, while she kept on looking at me. I had left off wearing a nightcap ever since I went to Hampton School; not that I ever slept there, but because the boys had laughed at it. My Uncle Corny always said that this was tempting Providence; and now I tried to put up my hands, but they would not go, and I sat and gazed, being a little surprised, but not amazed, as some people might have been. Then Kitty put up her hand to me, showing the palm of it quite rosy, as it always had been; and I saw that her dress was the one in the drawer; but that did not surprise me.
“Darling, you must be patient still. I am thousands of miles away from you;” she spoke as quietly as if she were saying – “The tea is not quite drawn yet,” and I received it as quietly. “There is a good reason for my going; and you know it better than I do. Only, be happy till I come back; for whatever you feel, I feel. When I come home, we shall never part again.”
This was a little too much for me, high and tragical as it seemed.
“I want you now. Oh Kitty, Kitty, don’t run away again!” I cried; and over went both my Windsor chairs, as I sprang up, to fling my arms round her.
But when I came to the place where she had been, lo, there was no one! Everything was cold and hard; instead of her soft warm figure, all I embraced was a kitchen towel; and the handle of a gridiron came between my vainly opened lips.